Recently I’ve noticed quite a few Americans taking an interest in soccer, be it international matches, European matches, or even MLS. However, the problem most of you probably have is you’ve never been given a primer on the sport, nor is there much information out there to get the new fan up to speed so they can go to the local pub and talk trash to all the Manchester United fans without getting embarrassed.

Well, that’s what I’m here for – nobody is ever going to know everything right from the start, and even I’m learning new things every day. So I present to you the Newbie Guide to Soccer. If you’re picking a team to root for, wondering what a Bundesliga is and if you need to see a doctor about it, or just want more info on the game, this is your place, so come join me as we take a look at the world’s game.

Today we’ll be covering the basics of the game and part two tomorrow we’ll look at picking a team to support and how you can gain access to the game.

The Name

It’s commonly known as football through most of the world, but here in the US it’s called soccer. The name soccer actually has roots in England as a word to differentiate from rugby (the nickname derived at the time was ruggers), which at the time was also called football. As we know now, football (the kicky type) retained the name football as it became the more popular name and rugby took on it’s nickname.

Now what do you call it (Assuming you’re an American)? It might be a point of contention for some folks, but me personally, I’ll always call it soccer while in the States. It’s just going to cause a confusing and unnecessary conversation about what you’re actually talking about if you say football. Again personal preference, footy is also acceptable, and probably what I’d use if I was in a pub on a Saturday morning. When you’re talking about it, know your audience and know what to say, you don’t want to be looked upon as a fool for saying the wrong thing.

Rules and Competitions

I’m going to assume you, the wonderful and charming reader, did not just climb out of a cave and know the basics. So I’m not going to go over the basic rules, but if you want a refresher course, you can go here.

Instead I’ll go over how most of the world does things, some leagues do it slightly different, but I’m using the English Premier League as my base of reference as that is probably going to be the league most Americans are going to start with.

There are three different competitions that all teams go through:

The FA Cup: Called different things in different countries, but the premise is generally the same, every team in England can play in the FA Cup, and by every team I mean every team - 762 teams participated last season! The better teams join in later rounds and the smaller clubs play each other early on and theoretically could creep up through and upset teams. This means more money for the teams that get through to later rounds, and makes for exciting matches when you get to see a small club knock off a couple of big ones.

The League Cup: This is the FA Cup’s little brother, currently called the Carling Cup, only allows the teams in the Football League and Premiership, or the top 92 teams in the English system. It’s less prestigious than the FA Cup, as many Premiership teams will use this as a chance to give a lot of their young players some first team action. It does still have some exciting moments though.

The League: Like your standard sports league, 20 teams per league, each team plays every team twice, once at home, once away. This is the main thing your team is focused on, the other two are nice, and obviously you want to do good in them, but if you bow out, not a huge deal.

Three teams per season get kicked out of the league (relegation) and three teams get bumped up from the lower league in the system (promoted), I’ll explain promotion and relegation shortly.

The championship of the league is won with a points system; you get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, and 0 points for a loss. So yes, conceivably a team can win the league championship on a day they didn’t play or even after a draw (or even a loss), my one point to the detractors of this is that you have to play at a high level all season to win the championship, you’re not backing into winning it as you’re probably winning at least 25 of your regular season matches to get there.

The reason for relegation and promotion are to keep teams fresh. Take the Pittsburgh Pirates for example; they’re able to sit around and sell off all of their good parts for a pair of Steelers tickets and a terrible towel with the knowledge that they’ve always got their lucrative TV money and various other revenue streams coming in every season. Well imagine if they knew they’d get kicked down to AAA if they finished in the bottom 3 of the league and lose a good chunk of revenue. I’m pretty sure they would be busting ass to work hard and make sure that didn’t happen.

Relegation makes things exciting for everyone at the bottom of the table too  – well, it’s more nerve racking than exciting, but it makes things interesting. The worst thing in sports is trying to feign interest in your favorite team when they’ve packed it in for the year because they’ve been mathematically eliminated. Almost no one is safe when it comes to relegation and makes teams play harder, and unless you’re the suckiest suck that ever sucked a suck, you’re still usually in it to the very end, even if you’ve been at the bottom of the table all season.

On the other side of the coin, promotion gives a team hope. You get a chance to prove yourself to the bigger teams, and it also brings more money, which will bring better players, and hopefully more fans. Check out this piece from Unprofessional Foul for a perfect theoretical example of promotion and relegation as it could relate to American sports.

There are also two European competitions teams can play in, The Champions League and the Europa Cup (formerly the UEFA Cup)

Champions League: This is the premier competition in Europe, pitting the top teams from each league against each other. It varies by country, but the major countries (England, Spain, Italy) get four teams into the Champions League, and it goes from there (for the whole listing of who gets in, check here). There are qualifying rounds to slim down the number of teams to 32 teams. At that point the 32 are seperated into groups of 4 and play the rest of the teams twice and the top two from each group make the knockout round.

The knockout round places the eight group winners and eight runners-up from the group stage are drawn into eight pairs of home-and-away matches. You can’t play a team from your same group or same country in this round. Teams are then re-seeded for the quarter-finals and none of the prior restrictions matter, and then the four remaining teams are then drawn into the final pool. Every match in the knockout round is a home and away match with the exception of the final which is a one off match.

Europa Cup: The Europa Cup is similar to the Champions League, and is similar to the NIT in College Basketball. The Europa Cup places are traditionally reserved for the winners of the various cups in certain countries, but in the major countries the teams that win the cup are often also in the Champions League positions, so the teams that finish in their league below the Champions League will often get the Europa League spots.

This season’s Europa Cup will feature 192 teams from the various leagues in Europe and runs in a format similar to the Champions League. The group stage whittles the number of competitors down to 38 and ten more teams are added who lost in the final qualifying round of the Champions League. These 48 teams are then broken down into a group stage featuring 12 groups of 4 teams. The winners and runners up of these groups are then drawn into the playoff round, as well as the 8 teams that came in 3rd in the Champions League. These 32 are then pooled and face each other in a home and away set of matches just like the Champions League.

The Match

Each game consists of two 45 minute halves with added stoppage time. The clock is continuous through each half, but to make up for lost time from injuries, substitutions, etc. the ref adds on stoppage time to the end of the half, typically in the range of 2-5 minutes but would be more if something like a serious injury were to happen. The clock also runs the opposite of American sports, from 0 to 45 for the first half, and then from 45 to 90 for the second half.

Extra Time: Each competition has its own rules regarding extra time, but for the most part you rarely see it. There are two different ways besides standard extra time to solve a draw and they vary by cup competiton. The traditional format of extra time is two 15 minute halves and if nobody is winning after that, they go to a penalty shootout.

Away Goals: The Champions League and Europa League use this as their primary decider for their home-and-away series. There are a few scenarios where away goals would factor in. We’ll use two imaginary teams named Red and Blue to break this down. (home team listed 1st)

-Red 1-1 Blue, Blue 2-2 Red: This is the simplest scenario, both teams drew both games, but Red scored 2 away goals to Blue’s 1 so red advances to the next round.
-Red 1-0 Blue, Blue 2-1 Red: The Red team still advances because they scored an away goal in the 2nd game.
-Red 3-1 Blue, Blue 5-2 Red: This is where things can get complicated. When the Red team wins big at home and then outscores the Blue teams away goals, the blue team needs an even bigger win to get through.
-Red 1-0 Blue, Blue 1-0 Red: This is the only scenario that would lead to extra time, when the scores are identical for both matches, it will result in extra time and penalties if needed.

Replays: This format is often used in domestic cup competitons. Since these competitions are just single legged matches, the home team is randomly selected, if the match ends in a draw, then they play a second match at the other team’s away ground and if no winner is determined from that then extra time and penalties happen. The FA Cup in England used to continue replays until a winner was determined and these could occasionally last 5-6 matches.

…and that in a nutshell is the basics of the game. Hopefully this answered some questions that you had about the game, but it probably raised some new ones, so have at it in the comments. Tomorrow we’ll get into the fun stuff and take a quick look at some teams so you can find the proper team to support ahead of the open of the season.

Tags: Adam, Basics of Soccer, footy, Gazza, John Terry's Tears Sustain Me, rules, soccer, Titi
Categories: Daily Specials, Domestics, Imports

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Daily Specials, Domestics, Imports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.